Interpretation, Context, and "the Region Currently Under Strain"

Here's a quotation from Richard Rorty about context, and the last two sentences are instructive for legal interpretation. It is impossible to read a text without a context. Instead of even trying to, the interpreter should consider how each object/text is situated within a broader contextual "web," from which insight can be draw for resolving the "tensions in the region currently under strain":

We pragmatists must object to, or reinterpret, two traditional methodological questions: 'What context is appropriate to this object?' and 'What is it that we are putting in context?' For us, all objects are always already contextualized. They all come with contexts attached, just as Riemannian space comes with axioms attached. So there is no question of taking an object out of its old context and examining it, all by itself, to see what new context might suit it. There is only a question about which other regions of the web we might look to to find ways of eliminating the residual tensions in the region currently under strain.

Richard Rorty, "Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation," in The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture (David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman eds. 1991), 64-65.

Comments

[JonFrum]

I am he as you are he, as you are me and we are all together
See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly
I'm crying
Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the van to come
Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday
Man, you been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen
I am the walrus, goo-goo g'joob

[SRG2]

Has no-one yet written a paper on "Transformative associations of the contextual walrus viewed as epiphenomena of musical discourse"?

[Matt F]

They pragmatists sound pretentious and wrong in that quote. I would cut the attempted geometric metaphor, and replace the last sentence with something different: “Instead, we can take an object out of its old context and examine it in our context to see what other new contexts might suit it.”

[Spencer]

Pompous word soup, glazing a banal observation. If you have something to say, just say it. "To understand a sentence, you need its context." Well, duh.

Why drag "Riemann space" into this? To sound profound? Euclid would be just as apt and 1/1000th as pretentious.

It's as silly as poets blathering about black holes or uncertainty.

[I did a graduate thesis on a problem in Riemann manifolds, so this is personally eye-rolling.]